ONF recognized top leadership during the ONF Member Workdays, held March 2-3, 2016. Congratulations to all of our outstanding recipients!
ONF Fellow Award presented to Ben Pfaff
Ben Pfaff (VMware) was appointed ONF Fellow by Dan Pitt (ONF) for Exceptional Leadership in SDN. Ben Pfaff, originally with Nicira and since 2012 with VMware, has served tirelessly in the Extensibility Working Group advancing the OpenFlow Specification and minimizing its deviation from Open vSwitch. If you have worked with Ben, you will know there is no one more meticulous, no one more dedicated to precise definition and coding, to wise definition and coding, then Ben. He knows what works, and what does not, in a commercial setting, and shares his knowledge and experience generously.
Ben is the committer’s committer in the open source world. He is a stickler for accuracy and economy. And, unlike a lot of others, Ben responds to imperfect submissions with simple facts, and is never churlish, condescending, or mean. His work and rigor are things of beauty. Last year, when ONF launched the OpenSourceSDN initiative, it was Ben’s wisdom and guidance, earned in his managing the OVS online community, that guided the formation of our OpenSourceSDN communities. Ben has served for the past two years on the Software Leadership Council and has been a faithful contributor, hard worker, and an expert guide in our efforts. For his lasting impact on OpenFlow, ONF, SDN, and Open Source SDN we are awarding Ben the title of ONF Fellow.
Outstanding Leadership Award:
Andy Malis, Huawei – Nominated by Rick Bauer and Dan Pitt (ONF):
Andy has been a dedicated contributor to ONF throughout the Obama administration, as a technical contributor, working-group chair, and area director. In this last role he has masterfully shepherded what could be considered a fairly vague area into a relevant source of thought leadership and actual artifacts that improve products and services, a number of which have spawned successful software adjuncts. Andy’s clear thinking and direct answers bolster everything he touches and his helpful and genial manner make him a pleasure to work with. It is therefore our honor to present Andy with this outstanding leadership award.
Outstanding Initiative Awards:
Chris Janz, Huawei – Nominated by Dave Hood (Ericsson) and Architecture and Framework WG:
Chris is willing to engage in repeated back-and-forth debate, offering thoughtful and constructive comments in ways that lead to a deep understanding of viewpoints, recognition of gaps, and agreement on ways to deal with them. This has been fundamental in the integration of intent NBI concepts into the SDN architecture.
Thanks, Chris, for pushing back and pushing forward.
Marco Alves, SDN Essentials – Nominated by Marc Cohn (ClearPath Networks) and the Market Area:
This award recognizes Marco Alves, who leads the ONF-Certified SDN Professional Program (OCSP) in the Market Area. Over the past several months, Marco has been a major contributor to the Skills Certification Program, participating in countless hours of planning and meetings, test blueprint and question development, and overall leadership. One of the ONF’s highlights of the year was the unveiling of the Beta program held at the Layer123 SDN & OpenFlow World Congress event in Dusseldorf last October, which yielded the first ONF-certified SDN Associates.
Marco has also been working on the ONF certified SDN Engineer program, which is expected to be completed within a matter of months.
Ricard Vilalta, CTTC, EU-JP STRAUSS – Nominated by Lyndon Ong (Ciena), Karthik Sethuraman (NEC), and the Open Transport WG:
Ricard has over the past year taken on the major work of driving the development of YANG and JSON data models and automated tools for the Transport API project. His work has bridged the gap between the standards work on modeling of transport networks and services and the development of software (including open source). Ricard hand-coded the YANG Schema for the Transport API UML Information Model which served as the basis for the UML-YANG mapping guidelines. This work has applicability beyond just Transport API work and is a significant piece of the broader ONF Information Modeling tool set that is being contributed to the industry through the Open Source SDN Eagle project. Ricard (and the ICT STRASS project) have also contributed the YANG-to-SWAGGER API and YANG-to-JSON Schema generation tools, which have enabled implementation of the Transport API models into working interfaces within transport network SDN controllers and elements. Ricard has demonstrated outstanding initiative, energy and determination in his work, and the Open Transport Working Group owes him and the ICT STRAUSS project a debt of gratitude for their efforts.
Bhumip Khasnabish, ZTE – Nominated by Edna Ganon (MRV), Dacheng Zhang (Alibaba), and the Migration Working Group:
In addition to chairing the WG’s working sessions many times including a face-to-face one, he has initiated many new and useful work items (RFI Template development, Demo, Migration Automation, Cost-Performance, etc.) in the Migration WG and competed the RFI Template (development guideline) doc. which is being prepared by Rick for publication. Bhumip is very devoted and keeps the momentum in the group activity. He is also a great team player, and really deserves to be recognized.
Outstanding Technical Contributor Awards:
Thorsten Heinze, Telefonica – Nominated by Lyndon Ong (Ciena) and the Open Transport WG:
Thorsten has been able in the past 8 months to create a wireless transport information model which has been acceptable by all the key industry microwave vendors. Wireless transport (or microwave) is traditionally a physical proprietary medium which has been developed in house by vendors for the past 30 years. This is the first time the industry is offered with the tools to provide a standard and open interface to this traditionally closed domain.
Using these tools we have the ability to revolutionize the way wireless transport NEs are provisioned and maintained and it’s the pillar for transforming these closed, static and configurable environments to open, dynamic programmable environments.
Thorsten has been practically working full time on this project in building the information model, translating it to UML, syncing the work with the core information model team and in general, investing all his energy, skills and wits to make this project happen. The documents he provided are of the highest quality, his attention to details is astonishing and his commitment is total.
Feng Wang, China Telecom Beijing Research Institute – Nominated by Weiqiang Cheng (China Mobile) and the Carrier Grade SDN Group:
Feng Wang from China Telecom is always active at Carrier Grade SDN group. His contributions are very important for the group. For the carrier grade SDN Framework document, he contributed several important chapters related to the requirements of SDN for Telecom operators and he also gave very valuable comments and suggestions as the key reviewer of the document. For the carrier grade SDN use case document, he contributed two valuable and Influential use cases.
Sridhar Bhaskaran, Cisco – Nominated by John Kaippallimalil (Huawei) and the Mobile Networks WG:
Sridhar has driven the work on adapting and extending the mobile packet core (MPC) architecture to cover the essential aspects for consideration in 3GPP. This makes it possible for the OF SDN protocol and mobile extensions to be considered as one of the technologies in contention – on which the 3GPP CP/ UP separation solution can be built. Sridhar has proposed detailed proposals to complete the MPC architecture document, coordinated with other team members and has had a relentless focus on timelines, gaps and deliverables.
Michael Orr, Ericsson – Nominated by Curt Beckman (Brocade) and the Open Datapath Working Group (ODWG):
Michael has invested significant amounts of time and energy in several different kinds of work that supports the Open Datapath Working Group efforts. He has done painstaking detailed reviews of documents, and also done significant creative work. He wrote up a high level Atrium TTP that helped us get the ball moving in that direction. He has reviewed TTPs and documents and new TTP language proposals. He has created syntax coloring tools and discovered other TTP tools as well. He has reviewed and commented on the TR relating to next generation SDN technologies. His diligence and support are very valuable.
Gordon Brebner, Xilinx – Nominated by Ben Mack-Crane (Corsa) and the Specification Area:
Gordon has been instrumental in leading the PIF open source project that is developing an Intermediate Representation for datapath programming. In addition to organizing and leading calls Gordon has developed and contributed BIR (pronounced “beer”) as a follow-on to AIR, the initial intermediate representation and datapath simulation environment. BIR maintains key aspects of AIR including the ability to experiment with various aspects of the intermediate representation. BIR also generalizes and simplifies some aspects of the intermediate representation, improving both flexibility and hardware platform independence. This is a significant step in our progress toward an open intermediate representation.
Nigel Davis, Ciena – Nominated by Kam LAM (Nokia) and the Information Modeling (IMP) group:
Nigel is a long-time outstanding contributor to the telecommunications industry in the specification of transport network management/control standards, including the widely deployed MTNM (Multi-Technology Network Management) and MTOSI (Multi-Technology OS-OS Interface) suites of specification. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to ONF to lead the development of the ONF Common Information Model suites of Recommendations (TR-512, TR-513, TR-514, & TR-515).
In addition to being THE architect of the ONF CIM Core Model, he is also championing the thrust of bringing the ONF CIM to the industry to be adopted as the cross SDO common information model. His network management architectural and information modeling expertise, dedication, vision, and leadership to rally the experts from the ONF member companies to collaborate closely and achieve the specification goals are again highly appreciated by the experts in ONF and beyond.
Malcolm Betts – Nominated by Kam Lam (Nokia), Nigel Davis (Ciena), and the Information Modeling (IMP) group:
Malcolm has been engaged in telecommunications standards for several decades and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table related to not only the telecoms technologies themselves but also their management-control. Malcolm has contributed to and helped shape the Information Model with some critical timely inputs over the past two years. His deep knowledge of layer processing and recognition of the fractal nature of the problem coupled with his ability to work in a highly dynamic practical environment has helped the team stay on track formulating a model that should withstand the test of time and network technology transitions. Malcolm is currently working with the media layers in ITU-T ensuring that work done there is appropriately compatible with the ONF management-control modeling. We want to recognize Malcolm for his ongoing critical input into the process of standardization and normalization of the telecoms industry and look forward to many more years of vital contribution….
No retiring yet Malcolm. 🙂
Outstanding Contributor Awards:
Haibin Song, Huawei – Nominated by Dacheng Zhang (Alibaba) and the Security WG:
Haibin has been serving in the security group since the end of 2014. He has a deep technology background and passion for the security work. He not only leads threat analysis work in the group, but makes contributions to and reviews other projects, acts as the vice-chair, and also greatly facilitates the communication of SDN security activities with other SDOs such as the IETF. We ill be sorry to see him leave this position because of a change in his scope of work at Huawei. We will miss the time with him and wish him all the best in his future career.
Nicolai Leymann, DT – Nominated by Weiqiang Cheng (China Mobile) and the Carrier Grade SDN Group:
Nicolai from Deutsche Telekom worked with the Carrier-Grade SDN group from the beginning of the working group setup and was a dedicated contributor to the group. He is one of the editors of the carrier grade SDN use case document and contributed valuable and Influential use cases. He also works as a key reviewer of the carrier grade SDN framework document. As a key person, Nic also contributed a lot to the ONF portfolio review in Düsseldorf for operators and the Interim meeting in Darmstadt.
